Artists and activists discuss the current state of LGBTQ rights across the globe, and how art-making and storytelling can effect social change for this community. Panelists include Malika Zouhali-Worrall, director of Call Me Kuchu, a film that documents the LGBTQ struggle in Uganda; André St. Clair, a Jamaican born interdisciplinary artist; and Steven G. Fullwood, founder of the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive. Speakers share experiences from international and New York contexts, drawing strategies for the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ rights worldwide. Curator and journalist Souleo moderates.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence.

Discussion will be held in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th floor.

French-born Ariel Kalma’s boundary-blurring electronic music spans free-jazz and spoken word trips to his infinite modular synthesizer and analogue drum machine meditations, often laden with wistful sax melodies. A pioneer in the field of modularly synthesized electronic music, Kalma finds an ideal collaborator in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who has gained renown for hypnotic modular and voice improvisations as Lichens. The two electronic synth voyagers came together recently at the invitation of Matt Werth, an intergenerational collaboration that yielded the duo’s recent LP, We Know Each Other Somehow, (2015) on the RVNG labels’ FRKWYS imprint. Traveling along parallel paths until now, together these artists summon another world, merging the collective voice with their own.

Born in France but rarely in one place for long, Ariel Kalma’s 1970s migrations took flight through the decade’s furthest spaces of musical and spiritual invention. As a hired horn for well-known French groups, the young musician toured as far as India in 1972, where he would later return to immerse himself in sacred music traditions. Kalma loyally worked with dual ReVox set-up— two tape machines “chained” together to form a primitive delay unit. Over looped saxophone melodies, Kalma would mix in all shades of polyphonic color, synthesizing fragments of poetry with ambient space or setting modal flute melodies to rippling drum machine patterns and starlit field recordings. The results collapse distinctions between “electro-acoustic”, “biomusicology” and “ambient” categorization.

In France during the mid-1970s, Kalma was staffed as a technician at Pierre Henry’s legendary Institut National Audiovisuel, Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM) studios – the same music concréte laboratory that spawned masterpieces by members Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis, and Bernard Parmegiani. Like his predecessors and colleagues at INA GRM, Kalma’s relationship to sound was both formal and non-hierarchical. To Kalma, all music existed as universal patterns, in perfect harmony with the people, places and environments it was created.

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b. 1975) is an artist and composer who works with his voice in the realm of spontaneous music most often under the moniker of Lichens. Creating patch pieces with modular synthesizer and tonal vocal work has been a focus of live performances and recordings recently. The quality of sound achieved through the marriage of synthesis and the voice have allowed for a heightened physicality in the way of ecstatic music both in live and recorded settings. The sensitivity of analogue modular systems echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, which in this case is meant to put forth a trancelike state to usher in a mode of deeper listening. His works on paper tend towards human relations to the natural/magical world and the repetition of motifs. 2015 will see further collaboration with French composer Ariel Kalma as well as Jóhann Jóhannsson, theatre/installation based work with artist Alexandra Wolkowicz, and a focus on video synthesis. Robert has collaborated with Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Sabrina Ratté, Rose Lazar, Nicolas Becker, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Tarek Atoui, Evan Calder Williams, Ariel Kalma, Lucky Dragons, Alexandra Wolkowicz, Biba Bell, ADULT, Doug Aitken, and Rose Kallal, as well as many others.

American Medium is excited to present “Somebody to Love” Jaimie Warren's first solo exhibition with the gallery opening August 9th, 2015. Following a six week residency at American Medium, Warren will unveil a new photo, video, and performance piece that was created in collaboration with high school students Kim Corona, Genesis Monegro, Arti Tripathi, and Daria Mateescu.

This artwork functions as an elaborate tribute piece to Freddy Mercury and the infamous band Queen; a re-creation of Sts. Cosmas and Damian (1370–75) by Matteo di Pacino. The painting's original image is interspersed with a bizarre variety of pop culture and art historical figures injected into the work by Warren and her collaborators. This will be the fourth in a series of projects in which Warren has worked with unique communities in residencies to conceive and create new performance-based works.

Warren's installation and accompanying video present a tableaux vivant come to life. The original painting, titled above, depicts a fictional documentation of the amputation of a leg from a man stricken with bubonic plague. Within Warren's new work (crafted from plastic, cardboard, and papier-maché) B-horror movie stars, contemporary pop stars, living piles of mush and eyeballs, and master opera singers unite to form a strange and heartfelt musical act dedicated to one of Warren’s biggest influences. Warren creates a vision where real-life legends and those culled from our collective visual history are acting within the same plane. Warren demonstrates her (and our) ability to empathize with personalities of a ridiculous range; regardless of their age, gender, species, or plane of existence.

Additional photographs by Warren will be on view in the back gallery.

Jaimie Warren was born in 1980 in Waukesha, Wisconsin and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-creator and co-director of the community-engaged traveling collective Whoop Dee Doo.

Recent solo exhibitions of Warren’s work have been presented at The Hole in New York, San Francisco Camerawork in California, Higher Pictures in New York and the Kennedy Museum in Ohio. Warren is a 2015 fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she is the recipient of the 2014 Baum Award for An Emerging American Photographer, and she is the subject of a 2008 monograph published by Aperture. Warren is a new featured artist in ART21's documentary series “New York Close Up”, with the first film focused on Whoop Dee Doo’s large-scale collaboration with the Urban Youth Theater Ensemble at Abrons Arts Center.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: IAN GERSON: FUTURE FLOOR
July 10 – August 9, 2015 Opening reception Friday, July 10, 7–10pm Tomato House is pleased to present Future Floor by Ian Gerson, from July 10 – August 9, 2015. The exhibition is open Saturdays and Sundays from 1–6pm with the artist present. Future Floor is a site-specific immersive installation that transforms Tomato House into an underwater/galactic exploration vessel. Visitors enter the belly of the ship, finding themselves in a control room glowing with otherworldly festive fluorescence. In this sunless realm we encounter large totemic paintings, constructed cardboard machinery, and obscure found objects resonating with themes of the underwater cosmos.
The deep sea/deep spacecraft embodies the human mind, compelled to plunge the greatest depths and explore the most distant territories. This technology also represents human limitation and the impossibility of cataloguing and conquering the vast universe. By creating a space of ambiguity and discovery, the installation invites us to encounter the strangeness of the natural world anew. Within the backdrop of our environmental degradation, we enter a portal to re-imagine and reclaim our future existence.
Ian Gerson makes installations comprised of built structures, large-scale paintings, and found and handmade objects. Exploring the borders of urban and natural territory, specifically the coastline, Gerson gathers organic and human-made flotsam and incorporates them into constructed environments. Through conversations and performances within the installations, the work opens up to encounter and chance. Making use of discarded and at-hand materials along with overlooked and vacated local spaces, the projects transform their settings physically and energetically, inviting viewers to suspend disbelief and join into a re-contemplation of our perceptual reality.
Ian Gerson is the recipient of numerous residencies and awards and holds a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin. Past projects include a temporary Travel Agency constructed in an empty Italian ice storefront in Williamsburg, a mock park ranger booth at Socrates Sculpture Park, a museum dedicated to a forgotten history of Governors Island, and a recreation of the home of a fictional artist and sea-lover on Staten Island.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the support of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Tomato House is an artist run space in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn that hosts exhibitions, screenings, and community events. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday 1–6pm and by appointment. For more information please contact Rebecca Bird at 347-770-7813.

Ora Clementi is the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian composer-performer James Rushford. Formed in 2013, their collaboration is a unique investigation into liminal performance states, with a focus on text and speech as preconscious thought processes. Central to cole and Rushford's duo are questions surrounding interpretation, the function of memory, semiotics, and the syntactical discipline of sound within both listener and performer. Utilizing various musical approaches in unorthodox and disorienting ways, their work incorporates field recordings, electronics, contact mics, various wind and keyboard instruments, percussion and voice. Using movement, conceptual performance practice and both amplified and acoustic sound, Ora Clementi play with subtleties of sensory perception, invoking a dreamlike context that hovers between musical performance and pure abstraction.

Originally a percussionist, Vito Ricci has crossed paths within the experimental jazz, avant-garde and punk scenes of downtown New York for decades. His pioneering experiments in electronic music are recently experiencing a resurgence thanks to a retrospective 2xLP set, I Was Crossing A Bridge released by Music From Memory this spring (a label named after Ricci’s 1985 album). Tonight Ricci combines his recordings with live sound, performing on computer, modular, and “wrench guitar” with special guests Lise Vachon and Steve Dalachinsky.

Trestle Gallery is pleased to present Necessary Construct. Each of these artists construct meaning through the process of reducing material to its constituent parts in order to reinterpret it through the creative process. Their works deconstruct material and content in order to re-imagine and create a new and necessary understanding of their subjects. Exposing hidden internal assumptions and con- tradictions, these artists subvert, reorder and add their point of view to the layered world around them.

BROOKLYN, NY – TSA New York is pleased to present Hysterical Friction: Works on Paper from JAUS LA. This is the first part of the Trading Aces project organized by ARTRA and Ashley Garrett – TSA New York will be exhibiting at JAUS in the fall.

Artists as curators, curators as artists, artists exhibiting their work for the first time, artists exhibiting their work for the zillionth time; such has been the profile of those who have either shown or organized shows at JAUS, Los Angeles. As an introduction for this artist-run space to the art community in New York, founder and director Ichiro Irie, has organized the group exhibition Hysterical Friction showcasing works by more than 20 artists.

How does one go about encapsulating six years of programming that has included everything from small drawings to large scale installations by well over 300 artists from all 6 continents without having a huge museum-like space and an extravagant budget? The quick and easy answer is that you can’t and you don’t. Nevertheless, out of a desire to give visitors some sense of what JAUS is all about, Hysterical Friction brings together, with a few exceptions, mostly LA artists who have previously shown at JAUS in the form of a works on paper exhibition.

Also featured are a few New York residents such as RISD & Rutgers alum, Erin Dunn; Davide Zucco who just had a solo show at NURTUREart, and recent Yale MFA grad Joseph Buckley. Also included are former New York residents Nick Brown, Shiri Mordechay, and Nathan Redwood.

Taken as a whole, the show attempts to exemplify the diversity of talent that JAUS has become known for with works ranging from the very minimal and conceptual to the very baroque and visceral. The contrasts created by the juxtaposition of so many disparate approaches in such proximity might create for a somewhat manic and jarring experience; an experience that will hopefully stimulate a dynamic and unexpected reading of each individual work.

Sketch from live models dressed in streetwear and sneakers from local brands and inspired by the exhibition The Rise of Sneaker Culture while having a drink and listening to music. Led by Liner Notes duo artist Nathan Sensel and DJ Sintalentos (Dan Nishimoto).

Tickets, which are $16 and include Museum admission and a complimentary drink ticket for The Counter café, will be available online. Members receive free tickets by calling (718) 501-6326.

Our experience of time is not constant, rather, it flexes and yields to the specific nature of our passage through space. Bound to Earth, this concept seems imperceptible, for we know no time but our own. Yet as we chart our passage around the sun, revolving on our own familial axis, time operates differently elsewhere. Compelled by operations outside our experience, each planetary body moves in its own discrete cycles, heeding standards that are as foreign as they appear desultory. From Earth, such notions hold no weight unless we ourselves become tied to them – fastened by our own physical connection to this extraneous action.

In an effort to illuminate these invisible constraints and become conscious of the standards that govern them, Sara Morawetz intends to abandon Earth time and to instead live by time as experienced on Mars. A Martian day is 24h 39m 35.24s, approximately 2.7% longer than a standard day on Earth. Morawetz will live according to Mars time for a full (although approximated) cycle – that would see her ‘day’ gradually separate from Earth-bound standards, invert, and then slowly return to synchronicity, an action that should take approximately 37 days to complete. This performative action is being conducted in consultation with Dr. Michael Allison of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

This work is part of an ongoing exploration of the processes that underpin scientific action. Morawetz is interested in the manner in which the constituent elements of the ’Scientific Method’ – namely observation, experimentation, method (as action) and standardization – are recounted within artistic practice and how these concepts can be further leveraged by artistic inquiry. Through her work, she aims to unravel the mechanics of scientific thinking by asking: what is method / observation / standardization? and, furthermore, how do these terms function outside scientific parameters in the fluid and mercurial sphere of artistic application?. Derived from the core principles of science, her work examines experimental investigation as a way of thinking and a mode of working, utilizing the philosophy of science as a means of critically interpreting systems, actions and processes. It is in this breakdown of artistic and scientific thinking that she aims to evaluate the volatile space in between, to examine the reciprocity within conceptual systems and to validate a communal passage that seeks to filter art through a scientific idiom.

Morawetz’s work is both research and process-driven, often employing durational, repetitious and participatory components – elements akin to a scientific experiment. These performative actions, that either become or create the work, are devised to test and expose the internal processes of methodological labour – the exhaustive, the obsessive, the poetic and the absurd – aspects that are all inherent to scientific practices.

Sara Morawetz is a Ph.D. Candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and an Australian Postgraduate Award recipient. She has been previously awarded the Martin Bequest Traveling scholarship and was a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Fine Art, The New School, NY in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in galleries within Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Richard Garrison analyzes ubiquitous materials, objects, activities and places from the suburban, often consumer related, American landscape, such as Sunday newspaper sale circulars, parking lot colors, product packaging colors, and architectural colors of locations like Disney World and Wal-mart, Target, Toys-R-Us, and Home Depot, among others. Through a process of careful scientific-like scrutiny Garrison dissects and restructures the color schemes of common everyday objects that are marketed and consumed by his average American family. This deconstruction of quotidian objects and experience is a personal, non-judgmental, examination of the visual, emotional and conceptual aspects of consumerism. While the analytical quantification and qualification of his studio practice offers us a thoughtful re-examination of objects and experiences ubiquitous to the suburban American experience; the resulting Minimalist compositions expose the beauty in the banal. This recontextualization of aspects of consumer culture affords us a new perspective on often overlooked or ignored experiences.

ISSUE Project Room's Fall 2015 season opens at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with Bill Orcutt and Circuit Des Yeux duo, as well as a solo set by Loren Connors. Known for his frenetic style crossing blues, punk, and free improvisation, Bill Orcutt is hailed as a master guitarist and has been a central driver of experimentalism since his days with 90s punk/noise duo Harry Pussy. This evening Orcutt appears for the first time duo with Circuit Des Yeux, alias of Chicago’s Haley Fohr. Celebrated for her brooding, raw songwriting and singular four-octave voice, Fohr shared bills with Orcutt numerous times before the pair came together for the recent release All That's Real, a collaborative 7” on Orcutt’s Palilalia label. Legendary improvising guitarist Loren Connors performs a solo set. Connors’ solo compositions have evolved continuously over three decades, moving between bare and soaring textures, yet always articulate with a deeply expressive core.

Bill Orcutt’s sound is a hiccup-stuttered reimagining of blues guitar. One can hear familiar Southern folk scales between Orcutt’s jagged solo acoustic phrases, pulling and pushing melodies into unresolved fragments that eventually come unmoored in vast and satisfying note-torrents. Former guitarist and founder of the noise/punk rock duo Harry Pussy, Orcutt was already a significant name in experimental noise circles when he released his solo debut in ‘96, and has published a string of releases since confirming his essential role in the contemporary experimental scene. Long interested in cutting-edge art, Orcutt had a Master's in English and had made several experimental short films, one of which sold to MTV in 1990. He also played in several local punk bands, most notably the Trash Monkeys, before forming Harry Pussy in 1992 with his wife, drummer Adris Hoyos. They worked together for the next five years, releasing a series of uncompromising and confrontational recordings on small labels and gaining acclaim from the likes of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Sebadoh's Lou Barlow.

Circuit des Yeux is the solo project of Chicago-based artist Haley Fohr. Named for the nerve in the eye that supplies power to the act of seeing, Circuit des Yeux launched in 2008 following a stint with the autodidactic duo Cromagnon. A combination of folk chanteuse and noise maven, Fohr’s sound vacillates seamlessly between lo-fi and effortless-sounding songwriting sophistication. Says Pitchfork, “the emotional depths can be intoxicating, and even life-affirming”. Between 2009-11 Fohr released three solo records and a series of EP’s and 7-inches with De Stijl, gaining international momentum with literally hundreds of live appearances around the world. Fohr’s highly anticipated 4th LP under the name Circuit des Yeux, Overdue (Ba Da Bing!, 2013), recorded over two months in a custom-built Chicago studio, is her most sophisticated to date. This most-recent work weaves a sonic bildungsroman, documenting the transition from collegiate cloister in pastoral Bloomington, Indiana to the noisy, haggard Chicago South Side.

Brooklyn-based guitarist Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors’ singular adaptation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors' three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O'Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House.

M. Lamar works across opera, metal, performance art, and video to craft sprawling narratives of radical racial and sexual transformation. The New York-based composer’s newest music theater piece, DESTRUCTION, for male soprano and piano with projections, is a song of mourning for “the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neo-segregation”. Drawing on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, the work explores radical historical expressions, and invoked long held and continued calls to end our current world order, synonymous with white supremacy. DESTRUCTION is a futuristic salvaging of the negro spirit in a destroyed western world in flames.

“Slavery to segregation to neosegregation is not progress, it is not even movement. Slavery is death and death is the end. But the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neosegregation is not the end of death. The cycle of repetition, slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation, white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black, is not living; it is not life, it is only the imitation of life.”
— Anthony Paul Farley

M. Lamar, referring to himself as a ”devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition," holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others. Lamar has had many years of classical vocal study with Ira Siff, among others; and is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant 2013–14 and a Harpo Foundation grant 2014-15.

Solo performances by Australian artists Lawrence English and John Chantler mark the New York edition of Room40:15, an international series events celebrating the 15th anniversary of English’s imprint and multi-arts organization Room40. Working with a modular synthesizer setup, John Chantler patches a versatile system capable of spontaneous change - from self-generated, shifting patterns of sliding arpeggios and visceral noise to pointillist interjections, near silence and infinitely variable texture. Among the most prolific and recognizable figures in contemporary ambient and experimental music, the work of Lawrence English undertakes study of perception, memory, and sonic affect across a wide swathe of creative forms.

Theodore:Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Samuel Laurence Cunnane. It will be his first solo exhibition in the United States.

Created within the last three years across various locations, including Portugal, Germany and Ireland, the photographs exhibited are part of an ongoing body of work dedicated to the idea of witnessing. Laurence Cunnane aims to distill moments from the march of everyday life “into a montage rich with some of its complexities and beauty”.

Though working within a documentarian tradition, Laurence Cunnane makes stylistic decisions that break with convention in their refusal to show all, instead honing in on precise details, stripped of context. Concealing as much as they reveal, his photographs shift our gaze towards the minute, getting closer to the unnoticed intricacies that flicker past in day-to-day experiences. Yet in its bid
for closeness, the camera can only create another barrier. Photography is on one hand an act of compassion and closeness, and yet what it leaves behind is an empty husk: a constellation of surfaces and reflections. Highlighting the immateriality of objects, the act of photographing is all that remains. The work itself becomes evidence of a longing and a search.

Laurence Cunnane uses 35mm film and analogue photographic techniques; the work is printed by hand by the artist. He remains strongly connected to the physicality of the production process, and speaks of his work in terms of “making” pictures, not “taking” them. His C-type prints are small in size, a side effect of his traditional production methods, but one that resonates with the restrained nature of the work.

Laurence Cunnane is a BA Photography graduate of IADT, Dublin (2011). Recent projects and exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2015); Feature Fortnightly Presents, Kerlin Gallery (2014); the screening Portfolio, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France (2012); Listen, Block T, Dublin (2011); and The Invisible City, The Joinery, Dublin (2009). In 2012, he began working in the Maysles Documentary Centre in New York, working alongside its founder, the celebrated American filmmaker Albert Maysles, to hand print his collection of documentary photographs.

Yarn/Wire celebrate the opening of their 10th anniversary season as well as their recent release with Pete Swanson, Eliminated Artist, on ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects imprint. The program includes three world premieres written specifically for the event, including works by experimental NYC musician and video artist David Bird, a new Fromm Foundation commission by composer/improviser Sam Pluta (Peter Evans Quintet / Wet Ink), and a new piece by electronics visionary Mark Fell (UK). This concert marks the fourth installment of Yarn/Wire/Currents, an ongoing collaboration between ISSUE and Yarn/Wire exploring the boundaries of contemporary music performance.

Doors open at 7pm with a public reception and DJ sets TBA, to continue throughout the evening.

Elise Engler: A Year On Broadway is an exhibition of drawings created in a year-long project to document every block of Broadway in Manhattan. Begun on May 19th, 2014, Ms Engler alternated drawing locations from uptown to downtown and back as she drew her way up and down the 18 miles Broadway slashes across the grid of Manhattan streets. Through wind and rain, snow and sunshine over an entire year Ms Engler has drawn every block on 6“ high x 22” wide sheets of paper that are accordian folded so that some views are 4“ wide, others are sometimes double and occasionally triple wide (12”). Attached together the entire project measures 6" high and 102' wide. She created the final drawing on May 18th, 2015 on the block near her home at 107th and Broadway.